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August 20, 2014 - Child Care Payment Update

8/4/2014

IDHS continues to provide up to date information on Child Care Assistance program payments. Here is the latest information provided on the Child Care information phone line: (217) 524-9041.

To find out when your payment was entered, you usually can use 800-804-3833. That number is supposed to tell of entered payments the working day after entry, approval of a payment the working day following the approval, and generally will tell about issue of a payment two working days after the issue. Unfortunately, 800-804-3833 for some callers, has not been working well lately. Later in this call we will give you some web site that you can use to see approved and issued payments. Licensed providers must enter the IVR case numbers to hear information on their payments. Please refer to the most recent child care certificate or other child care case information for the IVR number.

If you have a question regarding a redetermination, approval, address change, certificate needed, the number of days entered in for a payment, and many other questions, you will need to contact your child care office that takes care of your case. Also, contact the child care office that handles the case for any payment that was issued but was not received, or for those returned undeliverable to The Office of the Comptroller.

For this program, we draw our Federal Child Care funds in the middle of the month each month which allows us to approve and issue the majority of the payments. Some months we still have funds from the previous month that allow us to approve some payments early in the current month. It appears we will have a small amount of carry-over funding early in August. Most payments entered through 7/31 should be approved by DHS at least by 8/5 if not earlier. We note MOST on the approval of entered payments because some payments require extra technical work to process the payments. With the fiscal years changing for services being paid, it appears we will have some adjustments to payments getting approved in early August. We should have some payments get approved around August 5th for payments entered on August 1st for service months other than July 2014. For those payments entered on August 1st for July 2014 service, we should have some funding available, but with the new fiscal year it will take slightly longer for those payments to start to approve. It is expected that the July 2014 payments entered on August 1st may start to be approved by DHS around August 6th or August 7th. Funding should remain available for a short time next week. After that, most remaining payments should start to be approved when the mid-month funding becomes available starting around August 14th.

For issued payments, it appears many of the payments that were approved by DHS on July 31st were issued by The Office of the Comptroller on August 1st. With some funding being available we should see approved payments become issued for at least the next few days.

The child care payment process is 3 Steps. Your payment is entered into the child care system, when funding is available, and the system has no errors the payment is approved by DHS. After the payment is approved, generally the payment will be issued by The Office of the Comptroller 1-3 working days after the approval. Paper checks are mailed the next working day after being issued. Direct Deposit and debit card payments are in accounts 2 working days after issue. Weekends and holidays are not working days.